alt Hacker NewsHow long before companies start closing this "loophole"?
And with the cynicism out of the way, what an insightful and refreshing article!
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If MPC develops as an open standard and this "loophole" gains enough popularity, then companies can only really limit access to their services. This seems like a generally good thing that will enhance automation. In some cases it doesn't really matter if the automation comes from agents, hard coded software or a combination of the two.
Some remote MCPs will get locked down to know client endpoints, same as any other HTTP service, so if companies are really concerned about them being AI-use-only and don't mind cutting off some AI use to preserve that exclusivity, they’ll lock it down to the big known hosted AI frontends (assuming those end up supporting MCP; the only one I know of that does currently is ChatGPT Deep Research, and only for very limited shapes of servers.)
OTOH, that only effects those services, it won't stop people from leveraging MCP as, say, a generic local plugin model for non-AI apps.
I wouldn't call it cynicism.
Web services started as the same open utopia. Once everyone was in they jacked up the prices so high it killed the initial consumer apps (eg. Google Maps and Reddit)
Nobody is giving access to their walled garden for the good of open-anything. It's what the VCs and stockholders demand and they're the ones putting up the cash to keep this AI hype funded in spite of it running at a loss.
Given they haven't put security into MCP yet, I guess they'll need to do that first before they move on reinventing API keys so they can charge for access and hailing that as the next reason the line will go up.